LOWELL -- Maliya rides into the barbershop on her father's left arm, with a smile and a blanket clutched to her chest.

The curly-haired 1-year-old in a pink onesie doesn't stop moving. She only cries when her dad, William Cabrera Jr., whom people call Willy, tells her that she has to keep her shoes on if she's going to run around.

There are no customers in the shop yet, on this August Monday morning. Maliya has the run of the cutting floor and of the back office, which serves as the greater purpose behind everything that happens inside Billy's Barbershop on Andover Street.

The office is the headquarters of the Reclamation Center, a mecca for people trying to break out of their addictions, and who want the guiding hand of someone who has gone through the struggle himself. Like his father Billy, and a half-dozen other men who work in the shop, Willy Cabrera fits that bill.

Seeing Maliya frolicking through a place of such hope is what makes it all worthwhile for 27-year-old Willy.

"I do all this and I feel great about it," he said. "It's for me, but it's more for my daughter and my family, to show that you can break the chain."

The first time Willy met his dad, he was 7 or 8 years old.

Billy's life is a saga of its own. As a child, he came to Lawrence to stay with his grandmother after drugs brought an end to his own nuclear family in New York. During his adolescence and young adulthood he went through every grimy corner of the "system." Foster care, the streets, prison.

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Willy went to live with him in third grade, but Billy, still deep in the thrall of addiction, went back to prison.

"When I started growing up and seeing what was happening, looking at my family, most of them were addicts and I thought I only had two choices: to do drugs or sell drugs," Willy said. He chose the latter, at first, and he was good at it.

"I was addicted to making money," he said. No longer was he fingering quarters in his pocket when his wealthy high school friends showed up to the movies in Mercedes with $50 bills from their parents.

Willy graduated from Central Catholic High School in Lawrence and matriculated to Salem State University, where he was supposed to be studying business. Instead, he expanded his own business.

He lasted a year in college before truancy caught up with him. Soon, he was facing firearm and drug possession charges and a growing dependency on Percocets, the newest flavor of opioid making its way up illegally from Florida.

Thanks to the lack of a search warrant when he was arrested, the charges proved easier to beat than his addiction.

By this point, Billy had transformed. He was clean, working as a barber, and planting the seeds of what would become the Reclamation Center.

When Willy finally made the decision that his present and future, which were increasingly looking like his father's past, needed to change for good, he went to see Billy.

There was no shouting, no arguing, and certainly no judgment. After all, what could Billy criticize his son for? His rap sheet and list of wrongs were undoubtedly longer.

What Billy could offer was the wisdom of his own experience, finding counseling, breaking into an industry, and reclaiming his family.

"I understood that he's a grown man and was going through his own process," Billy said. "Let me tell you, he did it better than me."

Certificates of Willy's achievements at New England Hair Academy now hang in the Reclamation Center above Billy's desk.

People come from all around to get haircuts from Willy, Billy said.

Some are just haircuts. Others, like a Hampton, N.H., man who recently sat in Willy's black leather chair, start out as haircuts but become conversations about everything that's going wrong, and how the Reclamation Center can help.

"It's so hard to take off that mask and say 'This is who I am,'" Billy said. But that's the model behind the Reclamation Center. The staff hopes to expand into a mobile barbershop in the coming months.

If all goes as planned, when customers leave the shop, they'll look fresh and feel like they're poised for a fresh start.

"If you sit in my chair, I let you know that you're about to get the best haircut," Willy said. He doesn't prod or pressure anyone into exposing what brought them to the barbershop. But if they do it themselves, he has answers.

"I'm going to tell them everything I went through and exactly how I did it," he said. "We're a place of hope that shows people there's a way to change."

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